welcome! jeremy freese is a professor in sociology at northwestern university. he finds blogging to be a good diversion from insomnia and a far better use of time than television.

Friday, June 17, 2005

six of one, a half dozen of the other

If you publish a paper in the American Journal of Sociology, they send you five complimentary copies of the journal, in addition to the copy you already get if you are a subscriber. Not to get all laryngoscopic on a gift horse, but what am I supposed to do with these extra copies? I mean, it's kind of them to offer, but, as far as I know, there is no way to decline the complementary copies, and I've never known what to do with complementary copies other than have them take up increasingly precious bookshelf space. Am I supposed to give them to people who offered comments on the paper? But everybody in academia is simultaneously fighting a War On Paper coming into their office. Besides, even people like me who subscribe to AJS still just use the online archive for individual articles (btw, here's the link to the article in question, although I'm not sure if it will work).

9 comments:

That's funny. My entire family would be fighting to get copies of something I published. Not because they love to read sociology articles, nor do they understand what a published paper in AJS means. It's just a thing they do. But I guess that's because publishing is not exactly a routine occurence for me.

I say put them out on a table outside your office with a sign that says "free." A lot of grad students can't afford subscriptions, so I bet they'd take them.

i wonder this too. i like the free copies of journals that the articles appear in, that's cool. but i've never understood why people like having all the paper around when they can get the article online.

there is a discussion about this topic and taylor and francis publishers in crtnet right now, apparently people do not want to pay $25 per copy... i'm like, huh? why pay the publisher when your library or oclc is probably already paying them...